Outdoors: In the right spots, New England fall foliage is dazzling

Tuesday

Oct 23, 2012 at 6:00 AM

Mark Blazis Outdoors

New England has the most spectacular fall foliage in the world. But it can vary greatly from year to year. I chatted recently with several visiting leaf-peepers who were impressed with this season’s color up north. They were from Texas, Oklahoma, Florida and Japan — and didn’t know any better.

Northern foliage deserved at best a B. Some veteran critics confide they’d give it a C. Leaf color just never peaked. It was often pleasing, but seldom dazzling. Great foliage leaves us wowing.

Locally, we can experience exceptional color on the flatland highways leading out of Worcester. But we need to go north for a higher standard of expectation — mountains of color that elevate our eyes and aesthetic spirits. There, a rising parfait of overwhelming chromatic splendor can await us — some years.

During what should have been peak week for foliage watchers, I surveyed Vermont and New Hampshire, hoping to be dazzled. Though there were pockets of brilliance with individual trees that burst out vivid1y, 2012 foliage from Burke and Pittsburgh to the Kancamagus Highway down to Woodstock was hardly vintage. We shouldn’t be surprised or disappointed. Perfect foliage saturates northern New England maybe once a decade.

Brilliant colors, contrast and longevity must combine for a perfect foliage year. Some years, trees can be working toward that perfection, ideally holding their beauty for as long as a week. This year, too much peaking foliage was battered down overnight by bad weather. Just when some areas were coming into full splendor, ill-timed rains and wind conspired to drop them as we slept, leaving a dispiriting combination of barren branches and muted colors over a brilliantly carpeted forest floor.

Drought also stressed many northern trees, weakening their systems and reducing their color potential.

Peak spectacle demands contrast — dark evergreens juxtaposed against skeletal birches, splashy yellow aspens and beeches clashing with jalapeno-red maples, and salmon-orange mountain ash berries and sugar maples. Even some coppery oaks should be sprinkled in. Last year, maple’s gold was traded wholesale for dull bronze and oak’s copper was tarnished. This year was much better, though, because maple fungus, a plague in overly wet years, failed to perform its villainous alchemy.

Dry weather did prevent various anthracnose fungal diseases from infecting ashes, oaks, birches, cherry, beeches and hickories, as they did last year. When fungal infections set in, yellow leaves tend to spot or brown around their edges, developing lesions and shriveling, fading like an old tapestry. Browning quickly, they never attain their colorful potential. But too much dry weather is harmful to trees as well. If only nature were more moderate.

Happily, there’s always green to enjoy. Evergreens are perennially marvelous and surprisingly variable. Their ability to maintain color even through freezing conditions is chemical magic. They manufacture an anti-freeze from sugars and proteins. Just as saltwater has a lower freezing point, so does sugary water, especially when the evergreen cells reduce their water content later in the season. Amazingly, their cells temporarily transfer water into empty spaces where it can freeze in the leaf without rupturing the cells.

Hotels and lodges up north already are booking reservations for next year. Plan to observe the spectacle beginning at the end of September in the very far north, peaking around Columbus Day at Quechee Gorge and Woodstock, and beginning to explode around here about a week later. You need at least three weeks to follow its entire course. But varying conditions always makes timing a pilgrimage up north a gamble.

An employee at the Woodstock Inn confided that making reservations a year ahead of time can prove disappointing if you have only a couple of days to bet on. This year, the Wednesday and Thursday prior to Columbus Day had dazzling, paintbrush colors around Piko and Killington, just a half-hour from color-deficient Woodstock. Greater early precipitation in that vibrant area likely was responsible for the brilliant contrast. You sometimes need to explore to find the vibrant micro-pockets that were beneficiaries of ideal conditions.

Despite even muted tones, though, the massive hills and mountains always express magnificence, especially when seen from vista-exposing highways, like I-91 and Route 100. Mountain fog, though, can be a problem, especially early in the morning.

Open, sunlit panoramas with extensive elevation ranges provide maximum opportunities to witness whatever color is available, as varying conditions at different levels present themselves simultaneously. You often need to drive around mountains as well to do an area justice. One side can prove delightfully different from another just a couple miles away because of more beneficial exposures to sun, rain, temperature and wind.

Returning home unsaturated by this year’s color, I excitedly noted about halfway down Vermont a splash of vibrant yellow that extended for miles along the roadside. Alas, it was alluring — but deceptive, like a painted woman. Alien, invasive oriental bittersweet, spreading ever farther north, choking more and more trees, showed that even in nature, one can smile and be a villain.

The beauty of peak foliage will always be elusive, all too brief, and consequently all the more breathtaking when we find it.

As a hopeless tree hugger, I’ll be hunting for it through the very last possible moment, even on Interstate 395 this week on the way to my Connecticut tree stand, where at least there’s no shortage of deer.